Does an Ex-Catholic Expose Twisted Teachings of the Catholic Church?

You are listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. My name is Joe Heschmeyer. And I want to respond today to an extremely popular anti-Catholic video. And I say anti-Catholic because it is explicitly arguing against the Catholic Church and claiming that Catholics are apostates. So I’m not just throwing that title around it. In fact, the title of the video is Ex-Catholic Exposes the TWISTED, all caps, Teachings of the Catholic Church, by a fellow by the name of Mike Gendron who claims to have been a former devout Catholic. And as of this recording, there are over a million views of this video on YouTube. And it’s part of a two-day series he seems to have done. And so I’m going to quote from mostly that first day, but a little bit from the follow-up day because there’s a couple important lines that he has there as well. And I want to be clear at the outset, my point in this video is not to say this is his theology, this is what he believes, and let me respond with why I think the Catholic side is right and the Protestant side is wrong.

I want to do something a lot more basic than that. I want to say evangelicals hire people like this to come in, who’ve made a career out of attacking the Catholic Church. And these people come in and they tell them falsehoods, they just tell them outright things that are not true. And this stuff gets repeated over and over and over again, it pollutes any kind of meaningful theological dialogue between Catholics and Protestants, because Protestants are coming in with a bunch of lies that they’ve been told. And I say that advisedly, again, this is not just I differ in the interpretation. Let me give you an example, if I think John 6 teaches the Eucharist and you think it doesn’t, we have a difference of interpretation, but if you think there are 40 chapters to the Gospel of John and I think there are 21 chapters, that’s not a question of interpretation, that’s a basic factual question, one of us is clearly and demonstrably wrong. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. So I want to give a really clear example of this on the topic of indulgences, where Mike Gendron is going to make the claim that Vatican 2 both has a section teaching about indulgences and that it anesthetizes Protestants. And we’re going to see how he handles these false claims. It’s really, I don’t know, in my view, pretty remarkable.

This is Vatican Counsel 2, “The Roman Catholic Church commands that the usage of indulgences most beneficial to Christians should be kept in the church, and it condemns with anathema those who say indulgences are useless or the church does not have the power to grant them.” You and I are not only condemned over 100 times by the Council of Trent, we’re condemned by Vatican Council 2 because we do not believe in this nonsense.

Okay, so let’s unpack the claims he’s just made. Number one, he has a quotation that he insists is from the Second Vatican Council. He says it, and then he puts up a slide in which it says it’s from the Second Vatican Council. And then he is very explicit that it’s not from the Council of Trent, this is in addition to what he claims are the over 100 times Protestants are condemned with anathemas at the Council of Trent. And here’s the thing, all of that is factually false. What he’s quoting isn’t the Second Vatican Council, he’s quoting the Council of Trent. So no, it’s not in addition to the Council of Trent, he’s quoting the Council of Trent. You don’t get a count that as two sources by saying, “No, it’s not from the place it clearly is from.”

Now, you don’t have to take my word for it. You can Google this, you can take this quote, you can put it in Google and you can see that this is from the Council of Trent. And if you put in the words Vatican 2, you’ll see there’s only one person claiming it’s from the Second Vatican Council, and it’s Mike Gendron. And what makes this more bizarre is that’s not the only error there. He also claims there are more than 100 condemnations of Protestants in the Council of Trent. And no matter how you slice it, that’s not true, there aren’t even 100 anathemas in the Council of Trent, that doesn’t get into how many of them would apply to Protestants. And to make it even more bizarre is the second Vatican Council is very famous for not having any anathemas. That is many Catholics wanted Vatican 2 to condemn the heresies of the day, and none of them are explicitly singled out and condemned.

So these are all really egregious factual errors for anyone trying to teach you about Catholic theology to make. To put it this way, if you’re a Protestant, imagine a Catholic who didn’t know the difference between John Calvin and Billy Graham, and you would say, “Those are two very different people, about 500 years apart.” Well, that’s how it is here. The Council of Trent and Vatican Council 2 are two very different councils about 500 years apart. And if you don’t know the difference between them, you’re not really qualified to speak on the subject. But in addition to that, what makes this really strange, what makes this not just like, “Oh, you made a mistake,” but really bafflingly bizarre, is that my colleague Jimmy Akin pointed this out to him, and I don’t mean he pointed out to him a few days ago or a few weeks ago, I mean he wrote an entire article about why Mike Gendron is getting these things wrong in April of 2000.

Everything I just shared, he basically says the exact same thing, April of 2000, more than 23 years ago. And in the intervening nearly-quarter century, you know what Mike Gendron’s done? Nothing, he just says the same false claims over and over and over again, despite them being debunked, despite them being clearly false. And so this leads to one of two possibilities. Either he’s so unaware of what’s going on that he doesn’t realize he’s getting basic factual things wrong, he’s not listening to any of the Catholics who are correcting him, he’s just oblivious, totally incompetent to handle anything about what Catholics believe. The other possibility is that he doesn’t care about the truth, that he’s lying about it. Now, I’m not going to argue for one or the other of those possibilities because frankly, if either of those is correct, and those seem like the only two conclusions that would hold for why you would make the same claim against the Catholic Church for 23 years despite a simple Google search showing that none of it is true, if either he’s incompetent or he is lying, we shouldn’t be listening to him, we shouldn’t be taking him seriously.

And by all means, evangelicals, please stop inviting this guy into your church to lie to you or tell you falsehoods, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. You might say, “Hey, that’s one thing.” And it’s not. I’m going to take, as I mentioned at the beginning of this video, a short segment from the first part of the first talk that he gave and show you the number of times he misrepresents scripture or makes egregiously false historical claims. So let’s start with his claim that Jesus, He doesn’t just found one church, that the New Testament actually has two Christian churches. This is Mike Gendron.

Ever since the Lord Jesus founded His church 2,000 years ago, there have been two streams of Christianity running side by side. You have the Apostolic Church, this is the church the Lord Jesus founded, He is the only builder and its only head. “The Gates of Hell shall not prevail against His church.” The words of Jesus in Matthew 16, “His church is made up of born again Christians who are in Christ and sanctified by the truth. They’ve been called out of the world, sanctified by the truth, a people for God’s own possession.” It too has been operating for 2,000 years, it’s made up of churches, denominations, and individuals who departed from the true church or departed from the faith of the apostles. How do we know it’s been operating for 2000 years? In 1 John 2:19, John said, “They went out from us because they were never part of us. Had they been part of us, they would’ve remained with us.” Another way we can look at that, they went out from us because they were never born again. Had they been born again, they would’ve remained with us, but they departed from the faith of the apostles.

Okay, that’s the first claim he’s going to make. Now, if you are looking at the video, you may have noticed on his slide he’s going to give two Bible verses, and both of these are proof texts that Protestants really routinely misuse. And I want to highlight what they actually say, and then why I’m saying they’re being misused, why he’s misrepresenting scripture. First, in 1 John 2:18 and 19, the context is John is saying, “It’s the last hour. You’ve heard the Antichrist is coming, and that there are now many antichrists who have come, therefore we know it is the last hour.” And then he says, “They went out from us, but they were not of us. For had they been of us, they would’ve continued with us, but they went out, that it might be plain that they all are not of us.”

Now, I want to point out that this line is specific to antichrists who are leaving the church. Now John tells us what he means by an antichrist, someone who denies the incarnation, someone who denies that Christ came in the world in the flesh. At the time he’s writing, this is a popular heresy called Gnosticism, that denies, it says, “The flesh is evil. God the Father is a different god than God the Son.” But more than that, they’re actually rival gods, because the God of the Old Testament is evil, and the God of the New Testament came to liberate us from the evil world of matter. There’s a whole thing about the body being evil, about all this stuff. We don’t need to get into that, we’ll actually touch on that a little more in a second. The point there is that John is explicitly saying these antichrists, these deniers of the incarnation left because they didn’t really believe this in the first place.

Now, Mike is making two claims that are not in there. Now, I’ll say the first one that many Protestants make is they’ll say, “Well, therefore this passage means that anyone who leaves must never have really been in the church in the first place.” Nothing in the passage says that, nothing in the passage supports that at all. The idea that there’s a handful of antichrists who denied the incarnation, who didn’t really believe Jesus came in the flesh in the first place doesn’t mean that someone else might not have an actual faith and then lose it. Now, if you’re someone who believes in once saved, always saved, or perseverance of the saints, you might be intellectually committed to that belief, but that’s not taught here. Well, let’s make it really clear. If I say, “I have to leave because I’m going to the dentist.” And then someone else tells you they have to leave, you can’t say, “I guess that means they’re going to the dentist.” No, it doesn’t follow logically. One person or one group’s reason for leaving may not be another group or another person’s reason for leaving.

So that’s the simple thing, 1 John does not say anyone who leaves Christianity was never a true Christian, and it’s regularly misrepresented and misquoted as saying that it doesn’t say that, it doesn’t imply that. It’s consistent with the opposite of that, it does not say anything one way or the other on perseverance of the saints. And it has nothing to do with whether they were truly born again, it doesn’t say that, it doesn’t imply that at all. Now, you might have theology that says, “If they’re not of us, then they must not have ever been really born again.” But John doesn’t say that, that’s not his theology, you’re bringing that into the text.

But here’s where Mike goes really far with this, because he’s not just saying there are people who fall away from the church, he’s not just saying there are going to be apostates in every age. If that’s all he was saying, that’s a pretty uncontroversial claim. The fact that in every generation you will have people who fall away from Christianity, yeah, that’s fine, that’s true. What he’s claiming is that there’s actually a 2,000-year-old apostate church. Now think about this, the biblical evidence, and he quotes some of it, is that Jesus promises the Gates of Hell won’t prevail against the church. What he’s done is invented a parallel, opposite church that the Gates of Heaven won’t prevail against, an apostate church that is just as long-lasting, just as indestructible as the church of Jesus Christ. That’s a pretty remarkable claim to be based on no evidence, because notice, nothing that John says could reasonably… Go back to the line, “They went out from us, but they were none of us.”

Nothing in that says or implies that there’s going to be a 2,000-year-old indestructible apostate church that runs alongside the true church, it just isn’t there, he’s making that up. But we can go beyond that, because not only is it not there, it’s actually contrary to what scripture says. I already mentioned the indestructibility of the church is one of the hallmarks of the true church, Jesus says, “The Gates of Hell won’t prevail.” But in Acts 5, we actually read about how Gamaliel points out that one of the ways to tell what’s of God from what’s manmade is whether it lasts. So Gamaliel is a Pharisee, he is a teacher of St. Paul. He’s not, as far as we can tell, a Christian, although some early Christians thought he might have secretly been because he was so favorable to the Christians. Nevertheless, he warns the Sanhedrin not to persecute Christians, saying, “Take care what you do with these men.”

And then he points to two other movements. The first one was a guy by the name of Theodosius, who gave himself out to be somebody. And about 400 guys join him, he’s killed, and all who followed him were dispersed and came to nothing. So that’s the first test, if this isn’t of God, it’ll fail, it’ll fizzle out. The second test is really interesting, Judas the Galilean arose in the days of the census. He drew away some people, he dies and all who followed him were scattered. So this is the actual twofold biblical test we find. If it’s not of God, one of two things will happen, the movement will die or it’ll split up, you’ll have denominations. If instead it endures and is one invisible and organized, it hasn’t hit either of those fail-safes, it hasn’t proven itself false. And instead he points out in the present case, “I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone. For if this plan or this undertaking is of men, it will fail, but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them.”

So notice that reasoning, because Mike Gendron is arguing the opposite. He’s arguing there’s an apostate church that actually possesses this indestructibility, that it’s 2,000 years old just like the true church, in which case Gamaliel would just be wrong, we just would’ve to said, “Well, Acts 5 probably shouldn’t have been in the Bible because it’s wrong. It turns out, if it’s of men, if it’s of apostasy, it’s just as likely to last as if it’s of God.” Now hopefully that’s setting off some theological alarm bells because it’s clearly untrue. Okay, let’s get back to Mike Gendron’s argument.

And Paul told us that this would happen in 1 Timothy 4, “In latter times some will depart from the faith and follow doctrines of demons.” The fingerprints are on the Roman Catholic Church, because Paul defines one of the doctrines of demons they will follow, forbidding their priests to marry.

So he’s just lying about this. I don’t know another way to say it, because he is putting words in Paul’s mouth to make it sound like an anti-Catholic prophecy, where the actual context says nothing of the sort. So the text of he quoting is 1 Timothy 4, in which St Paul talks about a future time, that in latter time some will depart from the faith. Now, that’s actually going to be important language, that he’s saying this is a future event and will involve those who are in the church leaving the church. And he’s going to highlight two false teachings that they have. Number one, they forbid marriage. And number two, the enjoined abstinence from foods which God created to be received with thanksgiving. So they’re banning particular foods, saying these foods are evil. You can imagine all sorts of religions that fit this bill, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, all have variations of food prohibitions, and their forbidding marriage.

Now, if you put those two things together, you realize, “No, the Catholic Church actually says marriage is a sacrament, and there’s no forbidding of foods.” If you don’t omit one of them, and if you don’t invent language about forbidding priests to marry, well, then it doesn’t actually sound like the Catholic Church. So you see what he’s done here, he’s cut off half of the verse and he’s invented half of a verse to put in there. Those are deceptive moves, he can’t think that’s what the verse says as long as he can read the verse that he’s quoting. And so what’s Paul actually talking about? Because I can imagine someone hearing this and saying, “Well, maybe he’s still talking about something broader than the Catholic Church, but including the Catholic Church,” something like that. Well, let me give you some context first. Paul is pretty obviously referring to the heresy of Gnosticism, which is going to arise a few decades later.

St. Irenaeus of Leon who writes about it in the year 180 talks about this era, and he talks about the beliefs that it has. And one of the things that he talks about is that they declare that marriage and generation are from Satan. Now remember I actually mentioned them a little bit ago, if you believe the material world is evil, then obviously marriage and procreation are evil, but that’s not the Catholic belief at all. Catholics are all about the material world, we’ve got sacraments that use the body, we’ve got all this stuff. And we think marriage is a sacrament and its consummation is a sexual act, we’re 180 degrees from this. But the Gnostics also forbade certain foods, because remember, the material world is evil. So if you’re enjoying your meal, you’re delighting in the material world, and the material world is evil. Now, none of that is what the Catholic Church teaches at all.

Now, the Gnostics weren’t the last group to do these things. There were numerous other ones, the Cathars, there were the Albigensians, the Manicheans seem to have done some of this stuff. In more recent years you’ve got Heaven’s Gate which had weird views on sex and all of this stuff. You can find those groups throughout history, notably none of that includes the Catholic Church. Now, you might still be wondering, “Well, wouldn’t the requirement for priestly celibacy mean you’re forbidding marriage?” Well, no, because contextually that’s not what Paul is saying at all. And how do we know that? We know that by reading the Bible. So remember, 1 Timothy 4, he talks about those who forbid marriage. In 1 Timothy 5, he gives instructions for what’s called the Order of Widows. Now the Order of Widows, I want to be really clear, Paul is fine with the general idea that widows might remarry.

And so he actually says in 1 Corinthians 7 that it’s good for them to remain single as he does, but if they can’t exercise self-control, they should marry, for it’s better to marry than to be aflame with passion. But in 1 Timothy 5, a verse after the forbidding-marriage part, he actually has an exception to this in what’s called the Order of Widows, that if you enroll a widow… So the Order of Widows is where the church would take care of women whose husbands had died and maybe they didn’t have sons or anyone who could earn money to take care of them. And so they were in an economically vulnerable position, so the church would take care of them. But this included was pretty clearly a pledge of celibacy, that they would promise not to get married again. And how do we know that? Because Paul says not to enroll younger widows, “For when they grow wanton against Christ, they desire to marry, and so they incur condemnation for having violated their first pledge.”

So that’s the part that makes the Protestant interpretation of this really bizarre, that you’d have to believe that in 1 Timothy 4, St. Paul condemns as a Doctrine of Demons the very thing he himself teaches in 1 Timothy 5. That should set off all sorts of exegetical alarm bells that, “Hey, obviously I’m reading this wrong if I’m making Paul condemn himself as teaching the Doctrine of Demons.” But there’s a little more I want to say about this passage, because you’ll notice in the beginning part in 1 Timothy 4, he says, “In latter times some will depart.” That gives us two things we should be looking for for a false teaching. Number one, it’s coming up later. And number two, it involves leaving the church. This is a common theme of these kind of warnings. So in 2 Timothy 4, St. Paul says, “The time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myth.”

So again, you have the church comes first, the true gospel is first, and then at a later point heresy arises, and it leads people away from the truth into falsehood. So we can summarize that by saying true Christianity is older than heresy. So if you want to say true Christianity involves X, Y, Z teaching, I can then turn around and say, “Okay, show me how that’s older than the alternative.” Because as a Catholic, I can meet that burden. If you say you believe in Sola Fide, I could say, “Here a bunch of people before Martin Luther who didn’t.” If you say you deny that there should be one bishop per church, I can say, “Well, great, here’s 2,000 years of people saying there’s one bishop per church.” If you want to say all those things are abandonments of Christianity, you should be able to show, “Here’s a clear group of Protestants living in the first century, the second century, whenever, and here’s how the Catholic Church broke away from the Protestant church.” But of course anyone who knows history knows that didn’t happen.

True Christianity’s older than heresy. And so if the Protestant Church broke away from the Catholic Church, they’re the ones to watch out for. Now, I’m not just saying that here in the 21st century, but you can go back to St. Jerome, he gives this pretty simple test. In his dialogue against the Luciferians, now, side note, Luciferians didn’t worship Lucifer, they were followers of a guy with a really unfortunate name. He says at the end of this dialogue, where it’s a conversation with the guy who was following this guy, that sure, he could spend the entire day arguing, but he could dry up all the streams of argument with the single Son of the church. In other words, all of these issues that might divide us, we have recourse. We can point to the church and say, “Well, what does the church teach?” This is in the late 300s, early 400s, whenever he’s writing this.

And he says, “I’ll tell you my opinion briefly and without reserve, we ought to remain in that church which was founded by the apostles and continues to this day. If you ever hear of any that are called Christians taking their name not from the Lord Jesus, but from some others, for instance, Marcionites, Valencians [inaudible 00:22:52] the Mountain of the Plain, you may be sure that you have not the Church of Christ but the synagogue of antichrist. For the fact that they took their rise after the foundation of the church is proof that there are those who’s coming the apostle foretold.” Now, that’s a really critical kind of test, that if you want to disprove a theology, you can just say, “Okay, let’s find out when it was first taught.” Show me the unbroken 2,000-year teaching. If you can’t do that, you don’t have a true teaching. That if I can find an earlier time where nobody believed the thing you believed, I don’t just mean an argument from silence, I mean people are clearly believing the opposite, and nobody’s believing the thing your group believes, well, you guys are the breakaway. And the breakaway we’re told is the one to watch out for.

That’s it, that’s the biblical test. Jerome is just taking what Paul has said and saying, “Okay, logically, what does this mean?” If you get someone who says they’re a Lutheran or a Calvinist, say, “When are those guys from? Are those Jesus Christ?” “No, those guys are from the 16th century.” I guess they’re not from the first century, I guess they’re not apostles, I guess they’re not Jesus. That’s the argument in a nutshell. And then Jerome goes on, “Don’t flatter yourself…” He says, “… if you think you’ve got scripture on your side, because the devil himself quotes scripture, think about the temptations of Christ.” And then he says, the essence of the scriptures is not the letter but the meaning. And he gives a kind of funny example that if you were just a biblical literalist, you could concoct a new dogma, and assert that if you wear shoes and have two coats, you must not be received into the church.

And so what is he talking about there? He’s looking at particular things Jesus said. So Matthew 10 he talks about, he sends the apostles out and says not to take sandals, in Luke 10 he says the same thing, but in Mark 6 he actually tells them to wear sandals, but not to put on two tunics. So you can imagine someone saying, “Okay, my denomination says if you wear sandals, you’re not allowed here because Jesus said so.” And then a rival denomination across the street, also biblical literalist, says, “You have to wear sandals because Jesus said so.” In both of them, by focusing obsessively on the literal words and missing the meaning of what Jesus is saying about traveling simply would end up creating these rival denominations, both of which could point to scripture, but neither of whom understood scripture correctly.

The that’s the argument, and that Jerome is pointing out something that’s really critical, and it’s going to be very different than Mike Gendron’s view of history. And if you know churches really, you’ll know Jerome and not Mike Gendron is correct on this, that heretics constantly quoted scripture that they thought supported them. It wasn’t as the popular imagination would have it, that ordinary people just didn’t have the Bible and that’s why they were led into all these heresies. No, the heretics were quoting the Bible, but distorting and misunderstanding it, that’s the problem. So the fact that you can quote scripture for your position does not mean your position is correct, because every heretic in history could do that. Okay, so that’s the basic argument from history. Now, I want to get into what Mike Gendron says about the Early Church. And let’s start with his broad timeline of history, and then we’ll kind of look at why that timeline doesn’t work or make a lot of sense.

So when you look at the history of the church, you can see the first 600 years we refer to it as the ancient church, this is where scripture was boldly proclaimed. And then you have the medieval church over the next 900 years where scripture was hidden from the people. And then God raised up the Reformers, we have the Reformation Church in the 1500s where scripture was restored to the people, put in the common vernacular so people could read the word of God and be set free from religious deception. And then we have the modern church, or even now it’s probably more like the postmodern church, where scripture is being ignored. The medieval church was dominated by the Roman Catholic Church, and it continues its slide into apostasy.”

Okay, so that’s the basic timeline of history. And the first thing I should say here is, Mike Gendron has no idea what he’s talking about. And that might sound like I’m just being mean or rude or something like that, but no, he intentionally doesn’t know what he’s talking about. This is the part I find, I think bizarre. As a person who actually tries to get these things, the idea that someone would just come in and tell people what they want to hear and not bother to find out if he’s telling the truth or not is really jarring to me.

But remember, he claims that for the first 600 years scripture is boldly proclaimed. So great, that gives us something to work with. It sounds like Catholics and Protestants alike can agree on the first 600 years. Let’s find out what they believed, and that’ll be good because these are people who are boldly proclaiming scripture. And in fact, if his chart is to be believed, these people are better than we are today in the modern and the postmodern church, but actually that’s not what he believes. In fact, if you try to show him what the early Christians believed, he closes his eyes and doesn’t want to know. And I’m not just saying that, he says that. Here he is explaining why when people actually read the early Christians, they become Catholic and why he thinks the solution is not to read the early Christians.

A question came up by a bright star in our audience over the break, and she asked, “What’s the attraction for evangelicals joining the Catholic Church?” And there are really three. They start listening to Roman Catholic apologists that say that the Catholic Church is the one true church, therefore you need to come back to it. Another one is the early church fathers, and Roman Catholic apologists have always tried to get me to read them. And my response is, “How do I know they’re not the people that Paul warned us about at the end of his ministry, when he is in front of the Ephesian elders? Even from your own number, men will arise to distort the truth to lead people away.” Now, we want to build our theology on the inspired word of God, not on the uninspired words of men, whether it be church fathers or anyone else. And the third attraction is the Eucharist.

Okay, so he’s just said, “Yeah, a lot of evangelicals start reading the church fathers and they become Catholic.” And his response is that he refuses to read the church fathers when Catholics try to get him to. That’s really remarkable because he gives away the whole game. Here he spends an hour claiming, “Oh yeah, the early Christians believed what we believe, and the battled Catholic Church fell away from that and broke away.” And he’s got a whole timeline trying to show you when and how that happened, and it’s filled with all sorts of dates that all happen to be false, but we’ll get to that. And he doesn’t know any of this, he’s just making this up. How do we know he is making it up? Because he refuses to actually find out what the early Christians believed. And Catholics are trying to show him, and Protestants who read it are becoming Catholic. And all of that should be raising alarm bells like, “Oh wait, maybe these early Christians you just said are proclaiming scripture boldly, this beautiful ancient church. Oh, well, if that ancient church is Catholic, well, that certainly changes things.”

Now, I should tell you, I guess in the interest of, I don’t know, self-disclosure, self-promotion, whatever, I have a book called The Early Church was the Catholic Church. So if you want to find out more about this, many of the things we’re going to look at, I’ve actually written about these, and I’ve dug in, I’ve done the research. All the stuff he’s afraid to do, all the stuff he refuses to do, I’ve done. And it really confirms that the Early Church really was extremely Catholic. So you don’t get to say there were two rival churches out there, a true church and an apostate church. No, the evidence is that there’s one church until much later in history. And you don’t get to say, “Oh, these early Christians believed what we believe,” because they don’t, and they really obviously don’t. But I’m not just going to tell you that the way he’s going to just tell you the opposite, I’m actually going to try to do at least some work in showing you evidence, which is one thing that’s notably missing from his entire talk.

When you look at the Roman Catholic Church, it does have a thin veneer of truth that hides a false and fatal gospel.

Okay, now this is a really critical part of what he’s going to claim. And I want anyone who believes in salvation by faith alone but thinks Catholics aren’t Christians to consider what he’s about to tell you we both have in common. And this by the way, is a part where I actually do agree with him.

You see two circles on the screen, and the reason they overlap is because we share common truth with Roman Catholics. We believe in the fundamentals of the faith, if you will. The Roman Catholics believe and teach that there is a triune God, Jesus is the second person, He was born of a virgin, He lived a sinless life, obeying the law perfectly. Then he went to Calvary’s Cross, He died there for the sins of the world. And then three days later He was raised from the dead, and He will come back to judge the living in the dead. Those are the common truths that we share with Roman Catholics. That is why you see an overlap of the two circles.

Okay, so I think you have there, he calls it a thin veneer, but I’d say a massive amount of overlap. Meaning, if you think about this historically, Protestants have to say the Catholic Church got right, the Trinity, the two natures of Christ, the sinlessness of Christ, Christ’s death on the cross, His resurrection, all of these big things, the fundamentals of the faith as he describes them. It’s not that they got them from Protestants. Protestants got those things from Catholics, they inherited those things. They didn’t have to go figure out the Trinity for themselves, they didn’t have to reinvent the wheel, they got all those things. So if you are someone who claims that faith alone is all you need, or just trust in Jesus, not in your own works, and if you’re someone who says salvation isn’t because you got a theology quiz right, it’s because you trusted in Jesus, then you should consider the fact that we trust in Jesus. But Mike Gendron is going to claim that’s not enough, he’s going to say we don’t follow unwritten Protestant traditions. And this is the part that gets totally bizarre from a Catholic perspective, and I’ll let him explain it.

But what happens outside of the Bible is Roman Catholic traditions. We know that the gospel is fully contained in scripture, Paul tells us that in 1 Corinthians 15:1 to 4, where he defines the gospel, it is the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus according to what? Scripture.

Okay, but he’s already said, “We get the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus.” Correct. So if that’s what we need to believe, if that’s the gospel according to Paul, then we believe in the gospel. If that’s the checklist, he’s already said we check all those boxes and a lot more. But what makes this really bizarre is he’s trying to claim that everything has to come from scripture and from scripture alone. And he says St. Paul teaches this. And where does he teach it allegedly? 1 Corinthians 15. Now, if you are a regular viewer of this channel, we just talked about 1 Corinthians 15, it’s the so-called Corinthian Creed, it’s important for The Resurrection, because probably the latter part of it is one of the oldest proclamations of The Resurrection, that Paul doesn’t claim to have written it, he claims to be passing on what he received. And how did Paul receive it? He received it orally.

So Mike just claims St. Paul teaches sola scriptura in 1 Corinthians 15. I want you to look and see if you can find it anywhere, he says, “Now, to remind you brethren, in what terms I preached to you the gospel.” Wait a second, he doesn’t say, “I wrote to you the gospel.” This is 1 Corinthians, there’s no prior letter to the Corinthians. He’s talking about the oral proclamation of the gospel. What does he say about it? He says, “Which you received, and which you stand, by which you are saved.” So literally the passage that he quotes as teaching sola scriptura, the first verse says that the Corinthians were saved by oral proclamation of the gospel, because remember, when 1 Corinthians is written, virtually none of the New Testament has been written yet.

They were not saved because they kept the old law. They were not saved because they had the written scriptures that they’d grown up with as Jews. They are according to Paul, saved because of the proclamation of the gospel that Paul preached to them orally. And what does that consist of? He says, “I delivered to you as of first important what I also received.” Wait a second, did Paul receive that in written form? Not in any form we know of. Paul received that when he was instructed in Christianity after he became a new Christian. And what does that include? That Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures. And then for some bizarre reason, Mike Gendron stops the creed right there and doesn’t go on to any of the other parts, he doesn’t include any of The Resurrection appearances, because he’s trying to claim that this is all the things you have to believe, that Jesus died, was buried and rose again.”

That’s not what Paul says actually. He says, “I delivered to you as of importance what I also received.” And then Mike’s only including half of the stuff he considers the first importance, he cuts out all of The Resurrection appearances, because Mike Gendron’s point isn’t to actually find out about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, is to try to proof text this to make this say everything has to be taught in scripture alone. But when Paul is talking about according to the scriptures in those two mentions, he doesn’t mean according to the New Testament. He means according to the Old Testament. The New Testament hadn’t been written when Paul received this creed, none of it had. This is probably from the first couple months, maybe first two years after the actual death and resurrection of Jesus. So if it’s teaching that scripture alone is all you need, then he would have to say, “The Jewish scriptures alone are all you need, and you shouldn’t have listened to me when I preached to you something that wasn’t found in the gospel.” That would be the logical conclusion of taking it to mean what Mike Gendron claims it says. It just doesn’t say that. Okay, but there’s another proof text he’s going to use that is equally interesting, we’ll say.

In other words, we need no other book, no other authority. If you want to know how to be saved, it’s fully contained in the Bible. But the Roman Catholic Church has many ungodly traditions that are outside the Bible, and many of these traditions nullify and oppose the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Okay, so the other thing he cites there is Mark 7:13 about the Pharisaic traditions of men, and that is a common passage for Protestants to point to, thinking that it teaches what they believe. I think that is a serious misreading of it, but nevertheless, he’s by no means the first to teach it. What makes this so interesting to me is that he goes on the next day and actually acknowledges that sola scriptura itself, this teaching that he claims we’re going to hell for not believing, is itself a tradition of men. Now, I want you to think about the bizarre irony here. He’s saying Catholics are bad because we try to make you believe for salvation these things that aren’t found in the Bible. Instead, we should be believing sola scriptura, a thing that by his own admission is not found in the Bible. Here’s how he explains it.

Oh, they will tell you that sola scriptura is a evangelical tradition. Acknowledge that it’s not in the Bible, but you know why it’s one of our traditions? Because it wasn’t necessary until the Council of Trent. For the first 1,600 years of Christianity, everybody knew scripture was the authority. It was the Council of Trent that elevated tradition to be equal in authority.

Now, all of that is wrong, and he has no way of knowing that’s wrong because he refuses to read the first 1,600 years of Christianity. If he did, he would find that he is completely wrong about this. But before we get into the history, let’s just point out what he said. He said first, Catholics are wrong because we try to make you believe for salvation things that aren’t taught in scripture. And then he says we’re apostates, because even though we get the gospel right, according to St. Paul, this is his claim, we have to believe in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, we do, but even though we get the gospel right, we’re still going to hell because we don’t believe in sola scriptura, which he says is an unwritten Protestant tradition. And he says, “Yeah, sure it’s unwritten Protestant tradition, but people believed it for 1,600 years.”

Wait a second, what are the rules to this game? If I as a Catholic can’t say you Protestants are wrong because you don’t believe in this extra biblical thing that was taught for 1,600 years, then you don’t get to turn around and say, “You Catholics are wrong for not believing in this Protestant thing that’s been taught for 1,600 years.” But in other words, even if he was right, even if 1,600 years of Christians believed in sola scriptura, you can’t use that against the Catholic Church unless you say it’s okay to use unwritten tradition as binding on Christians. And sola scriptura is all about how you can’t use unwritten tradition as binding on Christians. So hopefully you can see it, even if his historical claim was right, it would be totally hypocritical and self-defeating for him to appeal to it. But what’s more, it’s not right, he has no idea what he’s talking about, and he’s saying things that are flagrantly false again about the history.

So St. Irenaeus Against Heresies talks about the Gnostics. And he says, when they’re confronted with scripture, or confounded from the scriptures, they turn around and say the scriptures aren’t correct or of authority or they’re ambiguous, and that you can’t get the truth from them unless you know about this secret tradition. And the Gnostics claim that the truth was not delivered by means of written documents, but viva voce, that is by voice, therefore also Paul declared, “But we speak wisdom among those that are perfect, but not the wisdom of this world.” In other words, the Gnostics are focusing on the fact that Paul says, “We speak wisdom,” to say, “The true wisdom is not what was written, it’s what was spoken.” You’ll notice the heretics quote scripture all the time, they just don’t understand it.

And so Irenaeus is making that point, we can get into a scriptural battle, and they’ll just say, “The scripture doesn’t say that, it’s ambiguous, it doesn’t really mean that.” But then he gives the other appeal, he says, “But when we refer to them to that tradition which originates from the apostles, then they claim to be not only wiser than the presbyters, but even the apostles because they have discovered the unadulterated truth.” And so he concludes, “It comes to this therefore, that these men do now consent neither to scripture nor to tradition.” So that’s in 180, and you can see there’s a two-pronged detached against heresy, he’s appealing to the Bible, and he’s appealing to tradition. According to Mike Gendron, nobody does this for 1,600 years, and yet when you actually read people in the 1,600 years that he refuses to read, you see them doing this kind of stuff all the time. So that’s the first thing. You’re going to see him later claim, as he just claimed a moment ago, that the Council of Trent raises scripture to this authority. But if you actually read, rather than just making false claims about the early Christians, you’ll see none of that’s true. But let’s go ahead and look at his timeline of where allegedly things go wrong.

This is why many evangelicals believe Catholicism is a valid form of Christianity, because of that thin veneer of truth that hides a false and fatal gospel. So when you look at Catholicism’s departure from the Apostolic faith, it really began in 431 where they declared baptism is what regenerates the soul.

Okay, I want to get into something real quick here. He’s claiming that these are the first time these things are taught. And I’m going to show this is not the first time these things are taught. And you’ll see that these are not departures from the Apostolic faith, or at least that they’re not departures from the Apostolic faith in any of the times and places he’s saying they are. Someone who doesn’t believe in these things might still say, “Yeah, the church might have gotten all these things wrong.” But at least they have to say this entire timeline is fictitious, that this is someone who’s gotten up in front of a group of people, and then to a million YouTube viewers, and just spouted one lie after another. He’s going to also have this weird thing about how Catholics baptize their babies on the seventh day, which I’ve never heard of, but it’s not in canon law, and maybe he knows of something that I don’t as a lifelong Catholic, but here he goes.

And today you probably know that many Roman Catholics are baptized at seven days old, that is said to be they’re regeneration, they’re made alive in Christ. Then you had this-

Okay, so let’s talk about that. Is it true that 431 is the first time that the church believed that baptism is what regenerates? Well, here again, you have to actually read what the Christians before 431 had to say. And if you do read that, then you see that’s not true at all. Everett Ferguson has a book called Baptism in the Early Church: History Theology and Liturgy in the First Five Centuries. And as you can imagine from the title, it’s about 500 years of Christianity from the time of the apostles on. And Everett Ferguson significantly is a Protestant. So you don’t have to take my word for it, even though I have a chapter on this in my book, you can take his word for it. And what he points out is that there’s a remarkable agreement in the Early Church on the benefits received in baptism. And he says, “These are already present in the New Testament texts themselves. There’s two fundamental blessings often repeated. The person baptized received forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit.” And then he points to Acts 2:38. “The two fundamental doctrinal interpretations of baptism are sharing in the death and resurrection of Christ.” That’s Romans 6:3 to 4. “And regeneration or rebirth from above,” John 3:5.

So I’m not going to get into the entire scriptural argument because the question here is not what does the Bible say about baptism, it’s what did Christians believe before 431 about baptism? And you could say Christians got it wrong immediately, but that would still make Mike Gendron wrong, who says that they got it wrong in 431. But I am going to show you at least the critical text that a lot of this is turning on. In John 3, Jesus talks about the need to be born again, or born anew, or born from above, the Greek can be interpreted all of those ways. He says, “Truly, truly I say to you, unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Nicodemus is trying to figure out what this means, and Jesus explains, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.”

So that’s pretty significant, that the rebirth Jesus is talking about, there’s two aspects, water and the Holy Spirit. If you take a symbolic vision of this and say, “Oh no, you’re born again when you invite Jesus into your heart.” Then yeah, you’ve got the Holy Spirit there, but you don’t have water. And if you say water’s a metaphor for the Spirit, then you’ve got Spirit in the Spirit. And that is a bizarre way for… If Jesus meant to say you just need the Holy Spirit, then it’s a very significant slip of the tongue that he accidentally mentioned water, when we know from John 3 itself the apostles were going out baptizing. John 3 and John 4 talk about the apostles going around baptizing.

And what makes us even stranger is that Acts 19 presents the difference between the baptism of Jesus and the baptism of John, is that only the baptism of Jesus gives you the Holy Spirit. We know this because when Apollos is at Corinth, Paul passes through the upper country and comes to Ephesus, he finds some disciples there, they’ve never even heard of the Holy Spirit. So when he asked him, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” They say they’ve never heard of it. And he says then, “Into what then were you baptized?” And they say, “Into John’s baptism.” Now, that’s significant for a lot of reasons. One reason is that it shows Christian baptism as Trinitarian, that he would expect them to have at least heard of the Holy Spirit when they got baptized.

And so Paul then explains that John baptized with a baptism of repentance, telling the people to believe in the one who was to come after him, that is Jesus. In other words, unlike Christian baptism, John’s baptism was symbolic. It was a symbol of our repentance. I mean merely symbolic, it’s not a sacrament, he’s not claiming it’s a sacrament, he’s not claiming you’re receiving the Holy Spirit, he’s just saying this is a way to signify your break from your past life. And that’s what Protestants, of the Baptist variety at least, tend to think baptism is today. But that’s not what St. Paul says baptism is, that’s what he says John’s baptism is, but Christian baptism isn’t like that. And so when these disciples hear this, they get baptized with a Christian baptism, and we’re told that when Paul had laid his hands upon them, the Holy Spirit came on them. So that’s the difference, it’s water and the Holy Spirit.

What Protestants offer in the born again experience and the born again variety is Spirit without water, what John offered was water without Spirit. The Catholic sacrament of baptism given to us by Jesus Christ is water and the Spirit, and that’s how we’re born again. And it’s not just me saying this, Christians have said this from the very beginning. Now, I’ll point out that when St. Paul talks about baptism, he treats it as a thing that Christians generally just get, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, it’s a basic part of the faith. And the early Christians were really clear that baptism does something. In fact, the transition from the symbolic baptism of John to the sacramental baptism of Jesus, St. Ignatius of Antioch highlights, is happening at Jesus’s baptism. He was born and baptized that by his passion he might purify the water. So those three moments, his birth is baptism, his passion coalesce to make this sacramental.

Now, that’s St. Ignatius of Antioch, and he’s writing in 107 to the Christians of Ephesus, “A church that…” These are the Ephesians, they’ve heard from St. Paul, and they preserved this letter as correct, as orthodox. So either Christianity fell into apostasy or something like it within a couple decades, but this apostate church lasted for 2,000 years, or they actually got this one right. But we’ll go on, because it’s not just Ignatius. St. Justin Martyr writing to the Roman Emperor in about the year 160, tells him about how we’re made new through Christ, that is how we’re born again. And he explains that when people are persuaded and believe that what we teach and say is true, and they’ve decided to be able to live accordingly, they’re instructed to pray and to fast for the remission of their sins, and that the Christians pray and fast with them, and they’re then brought to the water and regenerated. Remember, regeneration means being born again, generation, birth, regeneration, born again. They’re regenerated in the same manner in which we were ourselves regenerated. And then he explains what that manner is, it’s a Trinitarian baptism, in the named the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

And then Justin Martyr gives two biblical citations. One of them is one we already looked at, John 3:5. The other one is actually the Old Testament passage of Isaiah 1. And if you read the church fathers, you’ll find all sorts of other texts that say this. But again, I’m only giving you two of the fathers directly. I already quoted Everett Ferguson that for 500 years, the 500 years he’s looking at, it isn’t like there’s suddenly a baptism crisis after that, but in the 500 years he’s looking at, yeah, everybody basically agrees on everything about baptism. There’s a remarkable agreement on what baptism is, what it does. So if you’re a born again Christian who understands born again in a way that’s contrary to everyone in early Christianity, one of two things is possible. Either the followers of the apostles, who learned Christianity not just from reading about them, but actually talking to them, didn’t understand something as basic as baptism, or you don’t understand something as basic as baptism. One of those two things is right, but whichever one is right, what’s clear is that this is not some new teaching in the year 431. So that’s the first flagrant falsehood. The next one.

Sacrifice of the Mass in 500 AD, that’s where the Roman Catholic Church continues the work of redemption on an altar that Jesus finished on the cross.

Okay, so leaving aside the ways he’s getting sacrificial theology wrong, let’s just look at the historical issue, is the sacrifice of the Mass first taught in the year 500? And the answer is no. I would point to a couple Reformers. John Calvin complains that Satan had attempted to adulterate and envelope the sacred supper of Christ with thick darkness, that purity might not be preserved in the church. And he says that he blinded almost the whole world into the belief that the Mass was a sacrifice, an ablation for obtaining the remission of sins. Now, Calvin views this as a basically global phenomenon, the whole church believes in the sacrifice of the Mass, but he doesn’t actually give us a timeline. Martin Luther gives us a little more of a timeline. He complains that the mass is universally believed to be a sacrifice offered to God.

And he admits the words of the cannon of the mass appear to agree with this, that if you read the actual prayer that all Christians were praying in the Mass, it refers to these gifts, these offerings, these holy sacrifices, this oblation compares it to the sacrifice of Abel, Christ called the victim of the altar. And then Luther says, “We’ve got to add to this the sayings of the Holy Father…” That is the early Christians that Mike Gendron refuses to read, “… a great number of authorities and the usage that has been constantly observed throughout the world.” Now that is a really remarkable admission, because even though Martin Luther rejects the sacrifice of the Mass, he has to admit that everyone everywhere believed in the sacrifice of the Mass. He doesn’t pretend this is a thing that was newly invented in the year 500, this is what was always believed.

That’s really remarkable, because it means that for all of the attacks, and this again, remember this is Martin Luther attacking the sacrifice of the Mass, saying it’s a huge error. Nevertheless, he and Calvin know this is not some new thing, it’s not something from 500 or any other point, this is as far back as we go, and wherever we go, we find the sacrifice of the Mass. And that is really telling. It also is found in scripture. In 1 Corinthians 10, st. Paul says, “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there’s one bread, we who are many are one body for we all partake of the one bread.” Now he’s ready to answer the question, because you might be asking, “How can the Eucharist make us participate in the body and blood of Christ? And how can the Eucharist make us into the church?” Because those are the two things he just said it does.

And he’s going to tell you in two ways. Number one, he’s going to point you to the sacrifice of Israel. He says, “Consider it a practice of Israel. Are not those who eat the sacrifices partners in the altar?” Okay, so he’s saying the Eucharist is like the Jewish Old Testament sacrifices. And this is the part that Mike Gendron, you remember, he claims that Catholics are trying to complete the work that Christ finished on the cross, this is misunderstanding sacrificial theology. For food sacrifices of a particular kind, like the Passover, there were two stages. Number one, you would kill the sacrificial offering, preparation day. And number two, you would then eat the sacrifice, the Passover. And so with Christ, our Paschal lamb, as St. Paul calls Him in 1 Corinthians 15, we have those two moments. You have Christ on preparation day, Good Friday, being killed.

We don’t re-kill him when we consume His flesh and drink his blood, just like you didn’t re-kill the Passover lamb, when the day after preparation day you ate His flesh and drank… Well, you didn’t drink His blood, but you ate His flesh. So hopefully that’s clear, that we’re not re-sacrificing Christ, these are two stages to one sacrifice. And St. Paul points to this in explaining how the Eucharist works, that when you eat the sacrifice, you become a partner in the altar. If you don’t eat the sacrifice, you’re not a partner in the altar. That’s the logical extension, what he’s saying. So if you don’t eat the Eucharist, you’re not participating in the body and blood of Christ.

But then he goes on, because he’s going to give another, even more shocking example. He says, “What Pagan sacrifice, they offered to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be partners with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons.” So that’s the other example he gives it, like I said, it’s even more shocking, because he is going to say, “Yeah, in addition to being like the Jewish sacrificial practice, it’s also a little bit like the pagan sacrificial practice.” And he is going to draw this in really interesting parallel, this comparison and contrast between the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. So what’s the cup of demons? It’s these sacrificial offerings to demons. What’s the cup of the Lord? It’s the Eucharist, that only makes sense if it’s a sacrificial offering. The table of demons is like an altar, the table of the Lord is an altar.

So the parallelism all breaks down if you miss the fact that the Eucharist is a sacrifice. But again, I don’t want to just tell you what scripture says, I also want to say the early church understood it this way too. Ignatius of Antioch, I already mentioned him from 107, he talks about how there needs to be one altar and one bishop. The dedicate, from the first century, almost certainly from the first century, refers to how we need to come together, break bread and hold Eucharist after confessing your transgressions, that your offering may be pure. Now our offering’s the sacrifice. And then the obvious reference there would be when Jesus says you need to make amends with one another before you bring your gift to the altar. Now that’s always an interesting passage, because a lot of Protestants, if they don’t have altars, they have altar calls but no altars, have to just read that and say, “Oh, I guess this applies to something that no longer exists. This is just about the Jewish Temple.”

That’s really strange that it would be preserved in the New Testament even, like, “Why continue to give these instructions that are outdated by the year 70?” But in fact the altar still exists and the dedicate is really clear that there are still offerings, and that’s why we need to make amends before we approach the altar, but he doesn’t quote that passage. Strikingly, the dedicate quotes Malachi 1, which says that, “In every place in time offer me a pure sacrifice for I’m a great king and my name is wonderful among the heathen or among the nations,” depending on the translation that you use. And this is a very popular verse to cite, Malachi 1:11. St. Justin Martyr writing in about 150 here, this is about 10 years before his First Apology has a dialogue with Trypho, which he points to this passage and he says, “Look, this shows that God anticipates all the sacrifices which we offer through His name, and which Jesus Christ enjoin us to offer,” i.e. in the Eucharist of the bread and the cup, “… which are presented by Christians in all places throughout the world, bear’s witness that they’re well-pleasing to Him.”

So that’s really clear that Christians all over the world, or all over the known world at the time, believed the Eucharist was a sacrifice. And it wasn’t in 500, this is 107, this is 150. This is St. Paul writing in the first century, this is the dedicate from the first century. So all that’s to say is sacrifice of the Mass is not some invention of the year 500. Let’s continue.

Then you have indulgences. The definition of an indulgence is the remission of temporal punishment for sin. Then you have transubstan-

Okay, he doesn’t actually say the number there, but if you were looking at the screen, he’s claiming the first indulgences are an 1190, and this is wrong, but no less interestingly, in 1095 we clearly see Pope Urban talking about indulgences at the Council of Claremont, which he promises indulgences, the remission of sins by the power God has invested in him to the Crusaders. And significantly also in his instructions as the Crusaders, he mentions this as well, but he also tells him to follow the bishop who will set up with the aid of God on the day of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, that’s August 15th. And I mention that as anticipation for something that’s going to come next, which is that he’s going to have this really bizarre claim that assumption didn’t exist until 1950, and here we see a reference to it very clearly in 1095. This is by no means the earliest reference, but I mention all this to say he’s wrong about indulgences, but with indulgences, it’s a more complicated issue, so I’m going to leave that largely aside for now.

Creation, that’s where the priest is [inaudible 01:00:33]. Called Jesus down from heaven and be transubstantiated into the inner substance of a wafer such that that wafer becomes the physical body and blood, soul and divinity of Christ. And then-

So he’s saying that transubstantiation is first taught in 1215. Now you should already know from the fact that they’re teaching the sacrifice of the Mass as far back as we find anyone teaching, and in the continual practice of Christians all around the world we find the sacrifices of the Mass, that they aren’t sacrificing to God bread and wine. They understand this to actually be the body and blood of Jesus. And there’s plenty of passages we could point to to add on top of that. I’ll give you just one, because I think it should be… It’s hard to imagine believing in the sacrifice of the Mass and not believing in the real presence, but just in case. Ignatius of Antioch in his writing the letter to the church in Smyrna, and again, in the year 107, warns against the Gnostics, who we already heard about, because they don’t accept the body, they don’t accept the incarnation, they also don’t accept the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, they don’t believe in transubstantiation. And he warns about this.

He says they abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our savior Jesus Christ. And then he warns what’s going to happen. He says, “Those who speak against this gift of God incur death in the midst of their disputes, but it were better for them to treat it with respect, that they also might rise again.” In other words, he views this as disqualifying them for The Resurrection. Jesus promises in John 6 that if you eat His flesh and drink His blood you’ll rise again. And Ignatius’ point is, if you’re refusing to accept transubstantiation, if you’re refusing to accept the real presence, you’re cutting off your ticket to The Resurrection. That’s what he’s saying. And notably, that is not in 1215.

Then you have purgatory. It was first announced as a doctrine in 596. By the way, 596 was the first pope of the Catholic Church, Pope Gregory I, and he’s the one that began teaching purgatory.

Okay, I have no idea where he’s getting any of that. For starters, 596 isn’t even when he becomes Pope, Gregory becomes Pope in 590. But also, nobody, as far as I know, claims he’s the first one to teach purgatory, and also he’s certainly not the first pope. Now you might say, “What do you mean by pope? Are you referring to the title or you referring to the office?” Because papacy refers to papa, it’s more of a nickname than an actual title. But the belief that the bishop of Rome can teach in an authoritative and binding kind of way, we find this as far back as it goes. We find this earlier than the first reference to the Trinity. Irenaeus, who was also the first person to mention Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are the four gospels in the same book, Against Heresies, tells us that it’s within the power of all in every church to contemplate clearly the tradition of the apostles manifested throughout the whole world.

And how do we do that? Because we can trace who they made bishops and follow Apostolic succession, and show that the people that were made bishops by the apostles and so on didn’t believe any of these weird heresies that Irenaeus is dealing with. And he explains, “It’d be tedious to try to list every bishop and who they were ordained by for the last 180 years.” Instead, he said he’s going to focus on one church, which he calls the very great, the very ancient and universally-known church founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul. Now why does he specify Rome? Because he says, “It is a matter of necessity that every church should agree with this church on account of its preeminent authority.” So that’s right there. And then he goes on from there to name every bishop from Peter and Paul, then to Linus, all the way down to Eleutherius, who’s the 13th pope, who is the pope at the time that Irenaeus is writing.

So you can read all that, it’s in book three of Against Heresies. And so in that we see that really it is a three-pronged approach that he makes against the Gnostics. We mentioned already that he uses scripture and tradition against him. He also appeals to the magisterium, the teaching authority of the church. This is not some later invention from 596. So in other words, that’s all happening in 180. And he doesn’t seem to be inventing this, he’s saying this is given to us by the apostles, and he’s able to trace step by step how it was given to us by the apostles. So there you go. There’s there’s more on early papacy, but I want to be mindful of how long this episode is. So I’m giving just a little bit to show he’s making up all of the details. Let’s continue.

But I need to make a distinction between a teaching doctrine and an infallible dogma. Teaching doctrines can be changed such as limbo, Catholics taught that for a long time, now they no longer teach that, that was only a doctrine. But once it is raised to an infallible dogma, it’s pronounced by infallible bishops. And so they can never change a dogma. The whole system would collapse on itself if one infallible dogma is changed.

Okay, I want to point this out because this is actually an important distinction he’s making. He muddles it of course, but he is right that there’s a difference between teachings that are taught infallibly and those that are not. But notice that he’s claiming this is the first time this was… He could say some of these teachings which had been believed for 2,000 years were officially infallibly taught at such and such a date. He doesn’t say that. He claims this is when they were first taught. He’s not claiming the high bar, because there’s a lot of things, for instance, the church shouldn’t come out swinging against cloning in the first century. That doesn’t mean that the early Christians would’ve been fine with cloning, it just means the church hadn’t declared against it. You can think about any number of issues like this. The early Christians are clearly against abortion, we see it in several places, but there’s no official church council or anything that has to declare abortions wrong because everybody knew it was wrong.

But sometimes an issue becomes so controversial the church has to say, “No, you can’t do this other contrary thing.” So he is right about that, but notice he’s not saying, “Yeah, sure, Catholics always believed this, but they officially dogmatize this thing they already believed at such and such a date.” No, his claim is that they first taught it at such and such a date. Remember, going back to the beginning of his timeline, that this was first taught in 431. And so he’s claiming these are departures from Apostolic Christianity. So his claim is a historical one, that the apostles and their successors taught a certain thing, and then at a certain point in history, a new heretical teaching arose. So I want you to bear that in mind, because he’s going to give for the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of Mary the dates when they were infallibly declared dogmas. But he’s going to pretend that that’s the first time they were taught, and he knows the difference, and he is still going to misrepresent it.

So purgatory became that. In 1545 at the Counter-Reformation, the Catholic Church elevated its tradition to be equal in authority to God’s word.

Okay, we already saw that’s not true, but I’m just going to leave that alone.

Then you had the Immaculate Conception of Mary in 1854. Catholics are taught that Mary not only was conceived without sin, but lived a sinless life.

Okay, so let’s-

1870 of [inaudible 01:08:11].

Sorry. Is it true that in 1854, that’s the first time we see Christians teaching that Mary lived this sinless life? And if you know anything about early Christianity, you know that’s not true. And sometimes because we believe this, we’re accused of being Pelagian. And this is very funny for a particular reason, that one of the sources of Mary’s sinlessness is Augustine arguing against Pelagius. So Pelagius was a heretic who claimed it was possible to live a sinless life. And so Augustine quotes him to that effect. And Pelagius had claimed this whole list of saints we’re sinless. And Augustine says, “Other than the Virgin Mary, you’re wrong about that.” He says, “We must accept the Holy Virgin Mary, concerning to whom I wish to raise no question when it touches the subject of sins out of honor to the Lord.” Okay, so out of respect for God, respect for Jesus, he says, “From Him we know what abundance of grace for overcoming sin in every particular was conferred upon her who had the merit to conceive and bear Him who undoubtedly had no sin.”

That’s Augustine against Pelagius. And then says that with the exception of the Virgin, all of those saints would say that they were sinners. So that’s in Augustine’s On Nature and Grace. And so you see this notion that Mary lived a sinless life was something that was not new to 1854. Mary was regularly called the only pure one, she was compared to Eve, the sinless virgin in the Garden. There are all of these comparisons that we find in the early church. What is novel is knowing when human life begins, because where there had been a controversy was, “Okay. Well, if Mary was without sin, when does a human life begin in the course of pregnancy?” And we know now with better embryology that it’s the moment of conception, but at the time there were different views about, something like evolution frankly, in the womb, we’re not going to go into all that. But in other words, the idea that Mary lived a sinless life was uncontroversial. There were some people who denied it, but certainly it was uncontroversial in the sense that the majority view was that Mary lived a sinless life. It was only in 1854 that we combined that truth with the modern embryology of knowing when life begins to dogmatize the Immaculate Conception. Okay, so it’s not true that it was like first taught then.

Papal infallibility was pronounced [inaudible 01:10:33].

So he’s saying in 1870 papal infallibility was pronounced.

Previous popes. And then in 1950, Catholics began-

Hang on. The next one’s a real gem, but I want to get there in due time, because he’s just claimed that papal infallibility was first pronounced in 1870 and retroactively applied. But you already saw from Irenaeus that this was something already being believed in 180, in the sense that the pope [inaudible 01:10:58] binding kind of way. Now the contours of infallibility, when is the Pope infallible was an open question. And it’s something I think a lot of people still don’t understand today, that we don’t believe the Pope is just always infallible, that there are particular moments where the church on account of authority can teach in this binding sort of way. But nevertheless, that’s not new to 1870. You can find debates over papal infallibility from centuries prior to that.

It was pronounced, and they made it retroactive to all the previous popes.

I’ve saved them the best for last.

Then in 1950 Catholics began asking questions, “Wait a minute, if Mary never sinned, and sin is what causes death, where is Mary?” So they had to come up with another infallible dogma, Mary was miraculously assumed into heaven.

Okay, I’m glad that was the last one on his list because it’s so incredible it’d be hard to go on from there. He’s claiming that Catholics started asking in 1950, “What happened to Mary?” And they invented the Assumption of Mary as a solution to that problem, they’ve backed themselves into the corner, “Oh, in 1854 we declared the Immaculate Conception. What are we going to do now? I guess we have to say Mary was assumed into heaven.” And all of that is… You know what? I won’t just tell you how wrong it is, let me show you. Let me start with the Orthodox Church. Now remember, we’ve been not one church for just shy of 1,000 years, and the Orthodox on the same day as us celebrate the Assumption of Mary. They call it the Feast Remission of Mary. But if you read the texts they’re actually praying, they sing on the night before, “The Mother of God is about to rise in glory, ascending from earth to heaven. We ceaselessly praise her in song as truly Theotokos, Mother of God.”

And then on the feast itself, they prayed, “Neither the tomb nor death could hold the Theotokos who is constant in prayer and our firm hope in her intercessions. For being the mother of life, she was translated to life by the one who dwelt in her virginal womb.” So unless his theory is that in 1950 we somehow also changed the Orthodox Church’s liturgical calendar and somehow got a time machine and made it retroactive for centuries and centuries, remember earlier I mentioned that the First Crusade was launched on the feast of the Assumption of Mary. So now these time-traveling Catholics have gone back and messed with the liturgical calendars of both the East and the West sometime before the Great Schism of 1054. And you know what else time travelers did? They built things. For instance, the Church of the Dormition of the Theotokos in Albania from the sixth century. Yeah, apparently we had to do all of that.

So that’s just a couple examples. I want to give you a few other examples of the early Christians talking about this from a little before 1950. So St. Epiphanius who lived in the 300s, in his Panarion, is responding to a bunch of different heresies. And he’s actually responding to people who worshiped Mary, who tried to offer her sacrifice. And he tells them not to do that, but he acknowledges that she’s like Elijah, who is virgin from his mother’s womb, always remained so, and was taken up and has not seen death, and that she’s like John who leaned on the Lord’s breast, the disciple whom Jesus loved. So she’s beloved and was assumed into heaven, but he points out neither Elijah nor John are to be worshiped. So sure, Mary’s assumed into heaven, but we don’t worship her.

But if you really want someone who waxes poetic about the assumption, there’s a whole series of homilies on the Assumption of Mary by St. John Damascene in the 700s. And in sermon three, he describes this. And it’s really beautiful. So even though I don’t need to, I’m going to quote it at some length, that, “After ascending to the Father, Jesus to his mother, according to the flesh, to his own Father, assuming into the heavenly country, her who was heaven on earth. Today, the living ladder through whom the most high descended and was seen on earth and conversed with men was assumed into heaven by death. Today, the heavenly table, she who contained the bread of life, the fire of the Godhead, without knowing man, was assumed from earth to heaven. And the Gates of Heaven opened wide to receive the gate of God from the East. Today, the living city of God is transferred from the earthly to the heavenly Jerusalem. And she who conceived her firstborn and only son, the firstborn of all creation, the only begotten of the Father, rests in the church of the firstborn. The true and living ark of the Lord is taken to the peace of her son.”

I really love the poetry of that homily, but you’ll notice it’s a little before 1950. In sermon two on the Assumption of Mary, this is the last single quote, he imagines what this must have been like, he says, “The King was there to receive with divine embrace, the Holy, undefiled and stainless soul of His mother on her going home.” And you might say, “Wait a second, St. John Damascene, don’t you know that the Immaculate Conception hasn’t been invented yet? That’s not going to come until the 1800. Don’t you know the Assumption of Mary hasn’t been invented yet, it won’t come until the 1900s? And I think you would look like you were insane,” because these were taken for granted, and he does take them for granted. He’s treating her as being sinless, and says so while preaching a homily on the feast of her assumption into heaven.

So what can we take from that? Now, depending on where you are theologically, you may not agree that the early Christians were right about all those, but you should know that the early Christians believed all that. And you should know that when Mike Gendron says to a million people this timeline of when we started teaching these new doctrines, that he’s lying, that he’s getting all of these wrong. He’s either intentionally telling you something untrue, or he cares so little about the truth as to do even basic research finding out if these things were taught before that point. And in either case, you should know this is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, this is someone teaching you falsehood and telling you what you want to hear. And I say that because evangelical churches are inviting this guy in, rather than inviting a Catholic in, to say, “Can you explain what Catholics believe?” They invite someone who has no idea what Catholics believe to come and present himself as a former devout Catholic and then tell them one falsehood after another after another, because it’s what their ears want to hear.

And I would just say spiritually watch out for that. So if nothing else, I hope that one thing is really clear, Mike Gendron does not want you to read the early church fathers, he does not want you to know what early Christians believed, he refuses to read them himself. And I entreat you to read them. I’d be thrilled if you read my book, The Early Church was a Catholic Church. I’d be thrilled if you read any number of great books on the church fathers, but I’d be even more thrilled if you just actually took the time to read the early Christians in their own words, and you could see for yourself what they actually believe. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.

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